Op/Ed

Weed: I've Seen It Affect Young Minds

Posted August 11, 2017 09:50 am | Op-Ed

By
Winslow Myers

Fifty years ago I was speculating with a college
friend about what we might do with our lives. He
asserted that he wanted to spend his life bringing about
the legalization of marijuana. I kidded him at the time
because such an ambition seemed an absurd waste of his
talent and brains. He spent a number of years working
for the National Organization for the Reform of
Marijuana Laws (NORML) and as we know the goal of
comprehensive legalization may be coming within reach.
More and more states have legalized marijuana, some
states for recreational use, 23 others and counting for
medical use. The medical benefits are remarkable.

Meanwhile, the “war on drugs” has been an abysmal
failure. We desperately need creative thinking,
especially to respond to the opioid crisis in the U.S.
Some enlightened police departments are leaning away
from the criminalization of drug use and toward helping
people obtain treatment. For adolescents, legalizing
drugs may diminish their glamour as something forbidden.

As a high school teacher in the U.S. for 30 years, I
witnessed an almost total correlation in my students
between chronic marijuana use and a falling off of the
ability to come to class prepared to engage, ask
questions, and grow intellectually. For the teens I
worked with, marijuana was an insidious and consistent
killer of ambition. After I retired, clinical studies
emerged that seemed to confirm my observations—heavy
marijuana use has the potential to permanently damage
the young adolescent brain.

When I was teaching high school, one of the most
effective anti-cigarette propaganda tools was to remind
students that nicotine narrows veins and therefore could
hypothetically accelerate genital insensitivity in both
sexes. Fear mongering or not, that was an argument
they listened to! Further research may yield more
clarity about the deleterious effects of marijuana upon
young minds, or minds of all ages that will be as
effective in convincing teens not to overindulge.

My personal experience with weed was consistent with
my experience of my students, though at 76, I rarely
smoke anymore.

When I smoked it in my twenties, marijuana did act as
advertised, as a radical relaxant. It was amusing to get
high in a group and find every offhand remark
unaccountably hilarious. It was fun to play music with
friends and experience the illusion that everyone was a
far better guitarist and singer than we judged ourselves
to be when sober. But I always felt logy and out of
sorts for a few days after, not like an acute hangover
from too much alcohol but still, a price paid in
“lowness” for having gotten high that was more than just
my puritan heritage at work.

Nowadays a few puffs just put me to sleep. Who needs
it?

When I began a family, the issue became more
personal. My son Chase learned to play a mean electric
guitar at a young age. I assume marijuana was a constant
in his life not long after he bought his first
instrument and spent more and more hours with his
bandmates in various neighborhood garages.

He was arrested once for possession, though it did
nothing to make him more prudent. His academic record
remained dismal all the way through high school and he
graduated by the skin of his teeth.

In his early twenties, he pulled himself together and
began to study sound engineering at the Berklee College
of Music, even making the dean’s list.

The shadow temptation of drugs still loomed over him
though, and he departed this life at the age of 23 from
an overdose of methadone, imbibed at the house of an
addict acquaintance. His mother, my wife of 30
years, died more or less of grief a year later.

No doubt, tragedy conditions my skepticism about
blanket legalization. Those who are working for it would
view me as an unnecessarily alarmist.

I’ve known adults and adolescents whose chronic
marijuana use has clearly done something to diminish
their engagement with the challenges of life and work.
When people argue that marijuana use has no consequences
at all for mind or body, it makes me want to reconnect
with my college friend from so long ago. I’d like to ask
him if marijuana still stands up as his best answer to
facing life’s “ordinary unhappiness.”

Bottom line for me: legalize it, fine, but let’s also
figure out how to educate kids 10 and up to forego
marijuana for at least the decade when their brains are
still developing resilience — and wouldn’t we all prefer
it if it were outright prohibited for surgeons, train
engineers, passenger jet pilots, air traffic
controllers, and other professionals who need every
brain cell to deal with the unexpected?

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Winslow Myers is the author of
"Living Beyond War: A Citizen's Guide," and serves on
the boards of Beyond War and the War Prevention
Initative, and is syndicated by PeaceVoice.

Graphics and layout added by
the Observer

This piece was reprinted by the Columbia County Observer
with permission or license.